ARTICLES ABOUT STRANGERS BY DATE - PAGE 5

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scott Green, the head of the National Football League referees' union, said on Thursday sealing a deal to end a labor dispute with the NFL this week felt like officiating a Super Bowl game. The Washington law enforcement consultant and one-time lobbyist is among the NFL's most accomplished referees - experience that helped in hammering out a deal to end the lock out. "It was an intense process," Green, 61, said in an interview on Thursday, after clinching the deal late on Wednesday.

A Humboldt Park block club has a lesson to teach about how seriously to approach their role in violent neighborhoods: Days after 13-year-old Tyquan Tyler was fatally shot in the 6200 block of South Rhodes, a prayer group marched around the Woodlawn neighborhood, stopping at points to bow their heads and ask God to end the killings and shootings. Long-time resident and block club president of a neighboring street, Jean Clark was right there with them. But Clark wasn't there to pray, she said at the time.

In the final game of his high school career, long before an afternoon at Notre Dame Stadium ended unexpectedly and irritatingly, Everett Golson encountered some uncommon adversity. Or, more specifically, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound physical spectacle of terror that embodied it. Jadeveon Clowney, the child-freak in question and now an All-SEC defensive end at South Carolina, infiltrated Golson's mind and personal space instantly with a sack on the first snap. The first half of this state championship game in Columbia, S.C., did not go particularly well for Myrtle Beach High School and its quarterback after that.

Elaine Reck was minding her own business, standing in the cashier line at FAO Schwarz waiting to buy a stuffed gorilla. It was the morning of Dec. 14, 1995, and she wasn't paying much attention to anything until the customer in front of her handed the clerk two Buzz Lightyear watches and asked, "Do these watches fit adult wrists?" "I just blurt out to him, 'Are you buying those for adults?' I thought it was so cute and he turns to me and he says, 'Yes, I am. Would you like one?

The very antonym of "fun," writer-director Craig Zobel's new film "Compliance" is one of the toughest sits of the movie year 2012. But it's an uncompromising and, in its way, honorable drama built upon a prank call that goes on and on, getting worse and worse for the people on the other end of the line. Zobel's question is simple: How could this have happened? And it did. It happened, with varying results and degrees of cruelty and sexual violation, dozens of times. Most notoriously, in 2004 a man masquerading as a police officer telephoned a suburban Louisville McDonald's restaurant and told the manager that one of her employees had stolen money from a customer.

Recalling that Orland Park police had issued warnings about ruse burglaries, Mary Scarpaci asked her husband not to answer the doorbell when it rang one afternoon earlier this month. Mike Scarpaci, 85, answered cautiously - leaving the locked storm door shut as the man outside told him about work on the Silver Lake Country Club Golf Course, which backs up to the Scarpacis' tri-level home. His guard down, Mike Scarpaci followed the man to the back of his home to see what work was being planned.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Janna Ryan, thrust onto the national stage this weekend when her congressman husband Paul Ryan was named the Republican vice presidential nominee, strikes an appealing image as a stay-at-home mom raising three young children in Wisconsin. But the 43-year-old has been a Washington operative herself, hailing from a well-connected family and forging an early professional career as a congressional aide and healthcare lobbyist. Friends describe her as being able to navigate between different worlds -- from small-town Oklahoma and Wellesley College, a private women's college outside Boston that she attended, to complex policy debates in Washington.

Brian Timpone, a onetime TV reporter-turned-entrepreneur, believed he had created a business that promised to significantly cut the costs of gathering and producing local news. So did Tribune Co., the media company that owns the Chicago Tribune. The 39-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Journatic LLC struck a deal in April in which Tribune Co. agreed to invest an undisclosed amount in his 6-year-old media content provider. But less than three months later, the partnership has become an embarrassment after ethical breaches, including false bylines, plagiarism and fake quotations, were discovered.